True Grace

Photographer Dana Gluckstein spent decades photographing indigenous peoples around the globe. In celebration of this month's release of 'Dignity: In Honor of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,' which features 90 of her most powerful pictures, we talk to the legendary lenswoman, and get a sneak peek inside the book.

By
Kat Thomsen; Photographs by Dana Gluckstein

Nov 4, 2010

Dana Gluckstein

Dana Gluckstein is a celebrated, award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in countless campaigns, newspapers, and magazines (including ELLE!). In her 30-year career, she has captured cultural luminaries from Halston and Jane Russell to Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela with her vintage Hasselblad camera, but perhaps her most important work has been her personal mission, photographing indigenous communities around the globe. These stunning, inspiring, and heart-breaking photos, spanning three decades and tens of thousands of miles, have been collected in a new book, Dignity: In Honor of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, out next week from PowerHouse Books. We caught up with the author on the eve of a special reception at Donna Karan's Urban Zen to talk about the project.

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What was the biggest challenge you've faced in your many years of photographing these beautiful and diverse peoples?

One of the hardest challenges—besides the physical journeys to these sometimes very remote places, which can certainly be very challenging!—is the deeper challenge of how do we find our mission in life and our voice. What is it that we're going to say with our limited time here? How are we going to make our days count, to do the most that we are able to do? Especially as a woman, figuring out what to focus on, with all the balls we have to juggle.

After I graduated from Stanford, I really made a daring choice in my life—I'd gone to school to become a psychologist, and in my senior year fell in love with photography. I became passionate about working with the camera and, more important, with photographing people. Taking these photos [of indigenous peoples] doesn't make any money, so I do it around my commercial jobs, but my heart tells me I must do this. So my whole path was a challenge. You don't have a path laid out—you have a vision and you get stronger as you follow that vision.

In terms of more tangible challenges, aside from the physical distance, there's the need to travel safely and to find regional people who can translate for me—I talk endlessly to the subjects, telling them why I'm there and that I want to carry their essence and the spirit of their people and the beauty of their culture to others. I have to break down that initial barrier. It's not like a vacation—these are hard-working trips!

It's obvious from the photos that each subject speaks to you deeply and through your lens speaks to us. Was there a moment in your 30 years of photographing indigenous people that stands out in your mind as particularly transformative, or that the message was especially urgent?

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Some of these trips are impactful in a very sad way, though, like our trip two years ago to the San Bushmen—the decimation of their culture is devastating. Diamond mining concessions are forcing the Bushmen off their lands and forcing them into squalid settlement camps, which are rampant with alcoholism, tuberculosis, and AIDS. These people are the most ancient culture on earth; they subsist on the land. Their rituals demand that they hunt for skins, and the government is now requiring them to buy a hunting license in order to hunt. Like the San Bushmen, each of these pictures tells its own story, and each of them is so important and so urgent.

Throughout my career, most art directors would only ever want to see my commercial work—but I loved the other work [featuring the indigenous peoples], so I kept showing it. Fortunately, there were a couple of really talented directors who understood, like Miles Turpin, who saw my image of the Haitian lady with a pipe [which appears on Dignity's cover] and said it was exactly what he wanted for an Apple campaign. He said he wanted that sense of dignity that comes through so strongly in that photograph. So that image, one of the first images I took, on my first trip to Haiti, has really been a guiding force for me.

You shoot on film exclusively, with a vintage Hasselblad camera, in a very digital age. Have you ever lost a roll or broken the camera in one of these remote places? How does using traditional film affect and inspire your work?

Strangely, the only time I've ever actually broken a lens was photographing Robert Redford in California! I do love working with film, though it's very old-fashioned, as is the camera. The Hasselblad is really heavy, and the film is cumbersome...but it makes me feel like I'm Dorothea Lange. It makes me feel like I'm really making a statement and that I have to really think about what I'm doing, because it's arduous and limited. You can't just snap-snap-snap and delete. I think of it now as almost like my own sacred ritual. Before I've developed the film, I still get so nervous and excited to see it. There's always something on those proof sheets that's just like, oh, my goodness, there it is, I got that moment. That sparkle is still there after almost 30 years.

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All the women you photograph in Dignity, of all ages and sizes, appear so beautiful, so comfortable in their skins, and so confident. One particularly striking image is one we chose for our preview, of a girl in native dress, traditionally bare-breasted, wearing a toy cell phone around her neck. It presents such a collision of technology and tradition, to see a woman so easily embracing both sides of the spectrum and without any apparent bashfulness. Are there any lessons to be drawn from these cultures that would benefit their Western counterparts, who are famously image- and body-conscious?

In that particular photo, you can see the influence of well-meaning missionaries, telling the girl on the left that she needed to wear a bra, to cover up her breasts, but the girl didn't understand. She just thought it was something beautiful to adorn herself with. Her friend on the right is very comfortable bare-breasted, her nakedness decorated with this little toy that made its way to them somehow. Being comfortable in their bodies is very typical of these cultures. They know that breasts are made for nurturing, and they're especially beautiful when they're sagging, because it shows you fed and you nourished children with them.

I think that beauty is revered everywhere, in every culture. But they just don't have the trappings of our Western societies, where we have to keep up, and buy, and there's so much pressure for women to look a certain way. Native peoples don't really have that. There isn't the influence of television and computers and magazines and billboards constantly making them feel that their breasts aren't big enough or there are too many lines on their faces—those are signs of beauty in these traditional cultures.

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In a world of merciless modernization, these peoples are often maligned as backward or uncivilized. How do they fit into our modern world, and why is it so important to maintain these cultures? What should we be learning from them?

Like Desmond Tutu said in his foreword to the book, indigenous people have a gift to give us and that is the understanding that we, as a world, are made for harmony, and for interdependence. And if we are ever to truly prosper, we need to embody this. Sometimes people think these peoples are so far away or what do they have to do with my life? The truth is, they have everything to do with our lives here in the West. If we contribute to their demise—if we destroy the land, the air, the water, the resources—we're doing the same things to ourselves here, we're struggling with the same issues. We just look a little different. We're all in the same boat together.

The goal is not to glorify them but to take the best of these teachings, of the wisdom of these cultures. Many, like our own Native Americans, the Iroquois, have this concept of the seventh generation coming. If our leaders made decisions based only on what was good for the seventh generation, for our great-great-great-great-grandchildren, then we would have a much saner world. We wouldn't do things like create nuclear waste without having any idea how we would dispose of it, or drilling for oil with no viable safety plan if something were to go wrong. There are so many decisions that would be made differently if collectively our leaders, our own elders of government and of business, made their choices based on what was in the best interest of future generations, instead of how much money we can make this year, this quarter, or how much we can raise our GDP. If you had elders, men and women seated in council, discussing these things—they don't have to be sitting around a campfire! They can be in governments and houses of state—maybe they would make different choices.

You say in the book's afterword that you hope Dignity will serve as a call to action in support of indigenous peoples. What are the most useful and effective ways to support the indigenous populations? And how can people get involved?

I'm very hopeful that there is a renaissance happening on the planet right now, for indigenous peoples everywhere. That's why the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is so important—it's the first time that there is a universal declaration that tells every government in the world what they must do in order to ensure the survival and well-being of their peoples. Alarmingly, our own U.S. government along with Canada are the only two countries in the U.N. that have not accepted the Declaration. We must encourage our leaders and show our support for the initiative, and you can do that by signing this petition through Amnesty International letting our government know that it should be adopted, as soon as possible.

One person really can make a difference, you know. There will be others along the way who will come to join—it takes a village—but it's so important for people to step out and do work on something that they really believe in.

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